{"id":1326,"date":"2012-02-25T03:47:34","date_gmt":"2012-02-25T08:47:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rid-usa.org\/rid-usa-inc\/?p=1326"},"modified":"2021-04-27T20:01:04","modified_gmt":"2021-04-28T00:01:04","slug":"rid-founder-featured-in-history-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rid-usa.org\/rid-usa-inc\/2012\/02\/25\/rid-founder-featured-in-history-book\/","title":{"rendered":"RID Founder Featured in History Book"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"headline\">RID founder featured in history book<\/div>\n<div>Thursday, February 23, 2012<\/div>\n<div>By <a href=\"\/staff\/carl-strock\/\">Carl Strock<\/a> (<a href=\"\/staff\/carl-strock\/contact\/\">Contact<\/a>)<br \/>\nGazette Reporter<\/div>\n<p><br clear=\"right\" \/><br clear=\"right\" \/><\/p>\n<div>Text Size: <a href=\"#\">A<\/a> | <a href=\"#\">A<\/a> | <a href=\"#\">A<\/a><br \/>\n<noscript>&lt;iframe width=&#8221;200&#8243; height=&#8221;200&#8243; src=&#8221;http:\/\/g.adspeed.net\/ad.php?do=html&amp;aid=111385&amp;wd=200&amp;ht=200&amp;target=_top&#8221; frameborder=&#8221;1&#8243; scrolling=&#8221;no&#8221; allowtransparency=&#8221;true&#8221; hspace=&#8221;0&#8243; vspace=&#8221;0&#8243;&gt;&lt;img style=&#8221;border:1px;&#8221; src=&#8221;http:\/\/g.adspeed.net\/ad.php?do=img&amp;aid=111385&amp;wd=200&amp;ht=200&amp;pair=as&#8221; width=&#8221;200&#8243; height=&#8221;200&#8243;\/&gt;&lt;\/ifra<\/noscript>I\u2019m happy to see the good work of Schenectady\u2019s own Doris Aiken featured in the recent book \u201cOne for the Road: Drunk Driving Since 1900,\u201d by a medical historian at Columbia University, Barron H. Lerner.<\/div>\n<div id=\"storytext\">\n<p>Doris Aiken, in case you have forgotten, founded RID \u2014 Remove Intoxicated Drivers \u2014 back in 1978 and did as much as anyone in the country to raise awareness of drunk driving and more importantly to do something about it.<\/p>\n<p>She lobbied, she agitated, she campaigned, and within RID\u2019s first few years she had prevailed on the state Legislature to pass 13 bills aimed at deterring drunk driving, including a ban on plea bargaining, and as a result, alcohol-related traffic deaths dropped 23 percent, meaning 6,250 people lived who otherwise would have died.<\/p>\n<p>It was the beginning of a national movement against drunk driving, and a heady time it was, if you remember. It meant really a change in national consciousness.<\/p>\n<p>If you watch movies from the 1950s and 1940s, as I sometimes do, you\u2019ll see that everyone in them drinks all the time and it\u2019s considered perfectly normal. A sultry client enters the office of a private-eye at 10 in the morning, and the first question is, \u201cHave a drink?\u201d and the drink is already being poured before the question is answered.<\/p>\n<p>Drinking up to and including drunkeness used to be cool, and having a hangover was evidence of sophisticated living, which you may not know if you came of age since 1980. That\u2019s when RID got roaring and when other similar organizations like MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) and SADD (Students Against Drunk Driving) also got going, and when drinking, or at least drunkenness, became somewhat less than cool. That\u2019s when it became criminally irresponsible if you coupled it with driving a motor vehicle.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOne for the Road\u201d chronicles all of this, including the disagreements and rifts within the anti-DWI movement.<\/p>\n<p>The alcohol industry and the advertising industry that lived off it did their best to buy off the movement, and for a time succeeded with both MADD and SADD, giving large sums of money to both and seeing to it that they kept their focus on the aberrant behavior of the drunk driver rather than on the marketing of alcohol itself.<\/p>\n<p>Anheuser-Busch was pretty soon paying the salary of MADD\u2019s executive director and eventually contributed an estimated $850,000 over a five-year period to SADD. The industry\u2019s newly sensitive slogan became \u201cdrink responsibly,\u201d and it didn\u2019t take a marketing genius to see that the first half of that message was \u201cdrink.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Doris Aiken, bless her heart, accepted no alcohol-industry money, and as result says she became persona non grata in the national broadcast world, beholden to the advertising industry, in turn beholden to the alcohol industry. National television appearances were canceled, and interviews fell off.<\/p>\n<p>MADD became the big national anti-DWI name, and RID receded as far as public profile went.<\/p>\n<p>Indeed this new book quotes the then-head of the National Association of Broadcasters as saying, \u201cAs long as they\u2019re on Capitol Hill trying to get rid of beer and wine ads, we\u2019re not going to be very friendly.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>So this became a battle not so much between drunk drivers and non-drunk drivers \u2014 indeed, who was going to defend drunk drivers? \u2014 as a battle between those who put the focus solely on drunk drivers (MADD) and those who broadened the focus to include the alcohol and advertising industries (RID).<\/p>\n<p>It was quite a turn of events when the two most prominent figures in MADD, happily accepting alcohol industry contributions, both finally went to work flat-out for the alcohol industry \u2014 Cindi Lamb for the National Beer Wholesalers\u2019 Association, and Candy Lightner for a public relations firm that represented the American Beverage Institute.<\/p>\n<p>Doris Aiken tells me the book is \u201cvery accurate but doesn\u2019t go far enough,\u201d either in detailing RID\u2019s accomplishments or in explaining the backballing of the organization.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe not, but it\u2019s still an engaging story, and of course there is much more to it than I have summarized.<\/p>\n<p>It is a chronicle of a grass-roots movement that started in Schenectady and really did change cultural attitudes, and also of corporate efforts to dilute it for the sake of continuing profits. It\u2019s a story that has not yet completely played out and may never completely play out.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>RID founder featured in history book Thursday, February 23, 2012 By Carl Strock (Contact) Gazette Reporter Text Size: A | A | A &lt;iframe width=&#8221;200&#8243; height=&#8221;200&#8243; src=&#8221;http:\/\/g.adspeed.net\/ad.php?do=html&amp;aid=111385&amp;wd=200&amp;ht=200&amp;target=_top&#8221; frameborder=&#8221;1&#8243; scrolling=&#8221;no&#8221; allowtransparency=&#8221;true&#8221; hspace=&#8221;0&#8243; vspace=&#8221;0&#8243;&gt;&lt;img style=&#8221;border:1px;&#8221; src=&#8221;http:\/\/g.adspeed.net\/ad.php?do=img&amp;aid=111385&amp;wd=200&amp;ht=200&amp;pair=as&#8221; width=&#8221;200&#8243; height=&#8221;200&#8243;\/&gt;&lt;\/ifraI\u2019m happy to see the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rid-usa.org\/rid-usa-inc\/2012\/02\/25\/rid-founder-featured-in-history-book\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-rid-blog-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rid-usa.org\/rid-usa-inc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rid-usa.org\/rid-usa-inc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rid-usa.org\/rid-usa-inc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rid-usa.org\/rid-usa-inc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rid-usa.org\/rid-usa-inc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1326"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rid-usa.org\/rid-usa-inc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1326\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1328,"href":"https:\/\/www.rid-usa.org\/rid-usa-inc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1326\/revisions\/1328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rid-usa.org\/rid-usa-inc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rid-usa.org\/rid-usa-inc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rid-usa.org\/rid-usa-inc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}